By Henry L. Yu, M.D

“SMALL minds talk about people. Average minds talk about events. Great minds talk about ideas.”

Which of the three would you love to talk about first and foremost? Would it be “ideas, people and events?” or is it “people, ideas and events?”

A “people person” would prefer to read books about people—their biography, philosophy, principles, lifestyle, etc. You believe that from them, you could and would learn a lot.
People-watching is one pastime that “people persons” love to do, where you watch and observe how people talk, walk, eat, laugh, run, jump, or text, all for free.
Just as the eyes are the language of the soul, body movements convey a lot about the person. You find so much pleasure in watching people, you make a guessing game as to how old is that woman sitting across the table in a resto, or that man walking aimlessly in the mall, or that guy texting while walking. Sometimes you guess it right, but looks can be deceiving.

Day in and day out, we encounter different kinds of people. But everything boils down to one thing: all of us were kids once upon a time. What we are now, we owe to our past (childhood history, family upbringing, past associations, the people we grew up with, the environment that we’ve been exposed to, etc.).

Not a few of us only see people as they are now, in the present tense. But how about putting them in the past? What were they like when they were kids? Once upon a time, they, too, were young and innocent and carefree. Life is a cycle, remember?

Today, I see a reflection of my youth in the younger people around. I used to be endlessly curious with just about anything under the sun, the moon, and the stars. I asked why, for example, the moon moved when I moved, or why a dark shadow kept following me. In due time, I realized that all these were part of growing up, of being young, curious and inquisitive.
Our training in medical school required us to be observant at all times, to have that scientific sense of sight, smell, touch, hearing and taste. We were encouraged to ask questions when in doubt, putting a question mark instead of punctuating a statement with a period. In short, “dig deeper, go for details.”

Being observant is an important aspect of being a medical man, especially in taking a patient’s clinical history or conducting a physical examination. We observe and ask many questions relevant to the patient’s symptomatology.

So being a “people person” has worked to my advantage. In medicine, you treat the totality of a person and not just his headache or his hyperacidity. Dig deeper, go for details, find the root cause of a malady. Consequently, you learn 101 things just by watching people.

As two beautiful songs put it: “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world…” And, yes, “In this world of ordinary people, of extraordinary people, I’m glad there is you…” (Sun.Star Cebu Weekend)

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